Search - Saturday Night at the Baths on DVD

A View From A Time Gone By

Thomas Lockyer | Los Angeles | 03/29/2006

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I guess the best thing you can say about this film is that it gives the audience a sense of what gay life must have been like prior to the aids epedemic.
The acting is not very good, the editing is terrible, the film quality is poor and the sound is bad.
The best aspect of the film is the feature debut of Jane Olivor who sings a great rendition of "Pretty Girl" It is great to see her in performance from her early days in the business. Sometimes, however, the movement of her mouth and the sound of the film do not match.
I also enjoyed the drag show with Diana Ross and Judy Garland.

All in all, not a great movie, but its less than 90 minutes long so its worth a viewing...."

Conflicting Thoughts

Amos Lassen | Little Rock, Arkansas | 07/19/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Saturday Night at the Baths"

Conflicting Thoughts

Amos Lassen and Cinema Pride

"Saturday Night at the Baths" (WaterBearer Films) is entertaining, sincere and uplifting in the spirit of the late 60's and early 70's when bathhouses were the vogue. It is not, by any means, a great movie, but it was, when it was made (1975) a step forward for American movies. I remember the Continental Baths of the 70's and it was an amazing establishment. It was a pleasure palace with great lighting juice bar and coffee shop. An elevator, an indoor pool and sex, sex, sex. Bette Midler got her start there as did many young gay men. It was liberating and a place where sexuality could be expressed openly. The movie, however, does not capture the spirit of the bathhouse but it does catch the spirit of the time.
The plot of the film is thin but who needs a plot in a bathhouse? The ending, for the time it was made, is shocking. Two men, completely naked get into bed and kiss and this is something not seen in American cinema.
I have read several serious criticisms of this movie--that the editing is poor, that the acting and the script is bad. This is an independent film made at a time when Indies were few and far between. No major American studio would have made a movie on the subject of gay bathhouses back then so we should be glad we have this. It is an accurate look at gay life of the period and it is both gentle and hard. It shows the sordidness of the times and does so with wit and honesty. The realism of the characters shows a certain dignity. They were all looking for love wherever they could find it.
"Saturday Night" lets the audience know how we lived before AIDS decimated our numbers and this makes it important.
Now that bathhouses are barely existent, it is good that we have a record of them. They were once an integral part of gay life and cannot be ignored.
"

You Had To Be There to Know It All Happened Then.

Desmond G. Pereira | Perth, Western Australia | 02/24/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"When I was living is Sydney, Australia, I met my friend Steve Ostrow, who once told me all about his life in NYC and of the Continental Baths he ran, the famous celebrities who had their beginnings there and of the scandals that took place in the good ol' bad ol' days of sex in the 70's.

At the time I heard his stories, I was young and I found them hard to imagine. It all seemed like a good pitch for the play and movie "The Ritz", which he told me was actually based on the Continental Baths.

Two decades later, with the advent of the internet, Amazon.com and DVDs, I now have the pleasure of actually watching this movie and seeing it as it all happened so long ago.

I was thrilled to relive those heady, Bohemian, sexy, free, Studio 54 days, filled with fashion, perfume, sex, drugs and Disco, when big cities were populated with the jetset, the young, hip and the beautiful.

Younger, modern audiences may not be able to fully appreciate the nuances of this wonderfully nostalgic memoir, but older audiences who lived through the 70's will appreciate this moment in our social history.

I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoyed 'The Ritz', '54', 'The last Days of Disco' and films set in that era.

Relive your youth!"